Distance is a constant, Virginia

Yesterday morning I hopped in my car and drove northeast for hours and hours and hours (actually, fourteen and a half, but there was some heavy construction in Pennsylvania and I stopped every hour for five to ten minutes to stretch, so it probably should have only been twelve hours, if that), leaving behind autumn in Tennessee:



for autumn in Virginia:



(because nothing says "autumn" like a rest stop dedicated to a smallpox mass grave), West Virginia:



Pennsylvania:



and New York, which I haven't taken any pictures of because by the time I crossed the state line I was in full "must get to hotel tired of being in car" mode. I'll get some pictures here later, I'm sure.

I've made this drive a few times now. In fact, the picture I took at the Virginia Welcome Center yesterday:



is almost identical to the one I took in 2008, the last time I drove this instead of flying:



The only real difference is that I drove all of Tennessee in complete darkness this time, and the sun did not come up until I was well past the Virginia state line. That's the difference between a summer drive and one at the start of winter, I guess. Shorter days and daylight savings time playing havoc with your system, the same way that Virginia decided to play havoc with my bladder.

I started out kind of charmed by Virginia, even though it's a hateful place where the state attorney general stripped all protections for LGBT people from their state laws last year. I stopped for gas at Natural Bridge, and discovered this life sized concrete tiger at the gas station:





I had no idea what the Enchanted Castle was, but it kind of made me want to go back to Natural Bridge someday, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy toward Virginia for a while, until the thing with the bathroom happened.

In order to propel myself through these drives, I get myself good and wired on Diet Mountain Dew, which means that I tend to stop fairly regularly along the way for bathroom breaks. I was cruising through Virgina yesterday morning, monitoring my progress, when I passed a sign that said, "Next Rest Area 68 miles" and thought, "Oh, well, I'm doing 70, so I can be at that in an hour. That should be fine." Part of the way through that hour, I started to get that "have to pee" feeling, but I knew that somewhere, a half hour ahead, there was a rest stop available, and I continued blissfully chugging Diet Mountain Dew and singing along to the iPod.

Eventually, I saw another sign, right on schedule: "Rest Area 6 Miles". I thought, "Well, I'm doing seventy miles and hour. If I were doing sixty miles an hour, I'd be going a mile a minute, and I would be at the rest stop in six minutes. Since I'm doing seventy miles an hour, I'll be at the rest stop in... somewhere under six minutes." I'm not good at word problems, but I figured six minutes was welcome news, because "Hey, I have to pee sometime in the future" had transformed in the last half hour to "Now! Now! OH GOD PLEASE FIND A BATHROOM OR ELSE JUST JERK THE CAR OFF THE ROAD AND RUN INTO THE BUSHES AND I DON'T CARE WHO'S LOOKING OR IF THEY HAVE SNAKES HERE!"

I was feeling more cooped up than a truck full of chickens:



and I was ready to go, especially when random shuffle on the iPod produced "Champagne Supernova" with its intro of rustling water. After six minutes of frantic clock watching, there was still no rest area, and I started to wonder if I had done the math wrong, but then ahead in the distance, at seven minutes, I saw a blue sign and felt immediate, happy relief.

Until I read the sign, and it said, "Rest Area 2 Miles".

It is because of moments like this, when I am suddenly filled with blinding rage, that God has chosen not to grant me dangerous brain powers like an angry teenage girl in a Stephen King book.

If the rest area was six miles ahead, seven minutes ago at seventy miles per hour, how could it still be two miles ahead? IT CAN'T. It is mathematically impossible. Unless somewhere in those alleged six miles I drove over the mid-Atlantic Ridge or the San Andreas Fault or piloted the car through a Goddamn wormhole, the distance between two fixed points on a straight line is a constant, and if a car is moving along that constant at a specific speed, it will always take the same amount of time to travel from point A to point B. If a train leaves New York going fifty miles an hour and a train leaves Baltimore going sixty miles per hour some kid will always be able to tell you on his SAT where they will cross each other because Baltimore doesn't suddenly relocate to Florida in the middle of the word problem.

You can't just arbitrarily place that sign wherever you feel like six miles away might be, Virginia. People are counting on you, people who are full of Diet Mountain Dew and rage. You can't just play games with their lives and bladders and mount your signs wherever one happens to fall off the back of the sign truck.

At least in Tennessee our bathrooms are where we say they are.

Little Debbie's Epic Fail

After a lifetime of love and sugar, I think Little Debbie and I are breaking up, and she only has herself and her incompetent test kitchen employees to blame. What brought Little Debbie and I to this low place? What could make me turn my back on decades of Swiss Cake Rolls, Peanut Butter Bars, Zebra Cakes, and the occasional Spirit of America patriotic snack cake?

Little Debbie's Nutty Bar Cheesecake.

I saw the recipe for this on a box of Nutty Bars at least six months ago, and have been waiting for the right occasion to use it. As fat as I am, I haven't reached the point where I make myself a cheesecake surrounded in lunch cakes to eat at home, so I needed a social or a party or something, and my friends Elizabeth and Ben obliged by hosting a Superbowl gathering this weekened. Filled with wild excitement at the thought of finally making the Nutty Bar Cheesecake, I carefully compiled a grocery list and went to the store for the 24 Nutty Bars the recipe calls for. Fortunately for me, and I'm certain entirely coincidentally, the "family size" box of Nutty Bars happens to contain exactly 24.

Twelve of them, according to the recipe, need to be crushed in a blender:



This did not work.

The bars on the bottom got chopped, but the ones on the top wouldn't move, so I had to keep shutting the blender off, crushing them down with a spoon, blending, and repeating. I probably should have done it in the food processor, which was my first thought, but I was trying to follow the recipe. I didn't blame the failure on my good friend Little Debbie, though, and instead decided that I had put too many Nutty Bars in the blender at once.

Once the crushing was done, I dumped the results into a bowl:



poured melted butter on top of them, and spread the results on the bottom of a ten inch springform pan.

Since the next part is the point where Little Debbie ruined our lives, I will quote directly from the recipe:

Press into bottom of a 12" spring form pan. Set aside. Unwrap remaining Nutty Bars. Cut in half. Line rim of pan with bars as shown above.

Let's look at this for a moment. The recipe calls for 24 Nutty Bars, and the first step is to unwrap and crush 12 of them. That means that the remaining bars, referenced above, should number 12. Cut in half, there would be 24 bar sections to line the rim of a twelve inch pan. Given that mine was only ten inches, logic would suggest that not only would 12 bars be adequate, but I should actually have a piece or two left over. This is what I told myself as I began to line the rim of the pan, eyeballing the results and thinking, "Hmmm... this doesn't look like enough bars." I convinced myself I was wrong because, you know, why would Little Debbie lie to me? Surely a national corporation giving out recipes on the boxes their product is sold in would try those recipes first, right?



What's wrong with that picture?

Could it be, oh, I don't know, that maybe there aren't enough Nutty Bars?

I was so mad for a second that I thought I might be having a stroke. A violent stream of curses escaped my mouth, a string of colorful invectives that disparaged the employees of the Little Debbie snack cake company, the existence of Nutty Bars in general, and Little Debbie herself, her parentage, and her extended family. Even worse, I got mad all over again when I remembered that I was using a pan that was too small. If I'd actually been using the one the recipe called for, the gap would be even wider. All I wanted was to make a nice, fattening, fun dessert for my friends' party, and now I had to leave the apartment to go back to the grocery store because Nutty Bars aren't the kind of thing that you happen to have on hand or can ring your neighbor's doorbell to ask for a cup of.

Go to hell, Little Debbie, and while you're there, learn some math. See, Little Debbie, the circumference of a circle is the diameter multiplied by Pi. In the case of the 12 inch spring form pan you told me to use, and rounding Pi to 3.14, you'd need 37.68 inches of Nutty Bars. If each Nutty Bar is about an inch wide, that would be about 19 Nutty Bars cut in half, not 12. That's seven inches worth of Nutty Bars difference, you evil smiling liar. Did you even try this recipe before giving it out to people? Did you?

I think not.

You disgust me, Little Debbie. Your ignorance, your ineptitude, your obvious disrespect for your customers and lack of professional ethics, all of it. Your Nutty Bar Cheesecake is impossible to execute according to the recipe you provided, and there's no excuse for that. Even though this was delicious:



I have lost all faith in you and your products. We're through.

Right after I eat the rest of the extra box I had to buy.